This Weird Travel Hack Will Instantly Transport You Back to a Dream Vacation

Ever caught a whiff of someone's familiar-smelling aftershave and, in an instant, felt the ghost of a loved one who used to wear it materializing in front of you? Or let a scented lotion drum up an immersive, five-sense memory of the last time you sniffed it (perhaps as a kid, watching your mom get ready for a party)? Smell takes up a strange bit of real estate in our identities; the brain's olfactory center hooks directly into the memory and emotion centers, meaning scent is the only sense that instantly, involuntarily stirs up a vivid recollection — and the emotions that go along with it. It's the reason teens in '80s movies snuggle with their boyfriend's sweatshirt while he's away; aroma makes a memory realer than images, sounds, or touch ever could.

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As a health journalist, I've known about this neuroscience quirk for a while, but it wasn't until recently that I realized I could tap into it for my own benefit. It's forehead-smackingly simple: Now, when I'm on vacation, I let my nose do the souvenir shopping. For example, earlier this month, in Indonesia, I stopped at a market to buy the sultry incense fogging up every Buddhist temple I'd visited. I took home a bottle of natural bug spray compliments of my Ubud Resort, Mandapa, after a few nights of spritzing the stuff on to venture into the tropics, breathing in its lemony scent. The mosquitos have let up in my native New York City, but I still keep it next to the door for unusually warm nights. (It helps that the stuff doesn't contain DEET or other nasties.)

At Mandapa as well as Mulia Resort, an elegant beachfront complex further south, I pressed my nose into fallen frangipani flowers: big, colorful blossoms clustered on ubiquitous trees, with a scent like tropical-tinged lilies. In a market, I paid a few Indonesian rupiah for a hand-poured bottle of frangipani oil, which I drip into an oil diffuser at home. I even tucked into my suitcase a small bottle of the massage oil used when I blissed out at the Mulia Spa. It doubles as bath oil, so I drop a capful into the tub and breathe in the ginger, rosemary, and rose geranium.

These transporting tchotchkes don't take up much space in my apartment, and they certainly don't spark as many conversations as traditional travel reminders: exotic pillowcases, wall hangings, hand-loomed rugs, wood carvings, and the like. (And, yes, I carried home some of those, as well.) But while visual reminders just sit there, olfactory ones beg you to engage with them: I have to light the incense, refill the oil diffuser, or spritz on the insect repellant, which demands a little forethought and then a quiet moment of breathing it in. Then, as I continue with my day, the odor creeps from my nose and into my amygdala and hippocampus, queuing up the moments I first encountered the scents like a projectionist at an old time-y movie theater. It all feels rather mystical, which is appropriate, I suppose, for a portal back in time to my trip through Bali, that land of yoga, temples, and Eat, Pray, Love-inspired self-actualization.

And that's the amazing thing about traveling this way: It's an exercise in mindfulness. Throughout your trip (no, throughout your day) you have to pause and ask yourself: What's the olfactory situation right now? What are my senses — the subtler ones, the ones easily overlooked — telling me right now? Taking that five-sense inventory instantly shuts off the crazy monologue running through your head (what Buddhists call the Monkey Mind). And it lands you back in your body, right there on vacation: halfway up the side of a steep temple, deep in a stalagmite-riddled cave, or face-to-face with (ironically) an actual macaque in the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary — a very temporary and comparatively awesome state to be in. And each sensory check-in creates a portal, like a pin in your own personal timeline, that you can use to jump back and re-inhabit the memory even when you're back at your day-to-day life, grabbing groceries or suffering through a conference call.

Scent is the quickest means I've found for this kind of time travel, a sort of trippy way to reignite that vacation glow. And if there's anything we could all use to get through the winter, it's a little more of that holiday (-in-the-South-of-France) spirit.